I believe my need to give to others is a gift from my grandmother, an uneducated but wise old lady. I can still hear her voice as she told me many times, “Jimmy, if you take something out, you gotta put something back in.” And so it was; my childhood was filled with visits to neighbors, casseroles in hand, to sit alongside a bed listening to complaints, running errands for people too ill to make the trip. In those many ways, my grandmother built a lifetime habit.
Although not a member of an organized religion, as an adult I pledged a fraction of my salary to give for the good of others. It was not always easy from a teacher’s pay, but my grandmother had done her work well. Lacking the means of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, I decided to narrow my efforts to include only those who had given most to me, novelists and investigative journalists.
It’s as simple as that, Thanks to grandma I put back in for the blessings I took and those I continue to take out.
I enjoy the stagecraft and fantasy of a historical fiction world. No matter how well researched, we can only imagine what it was like “back then.” Homo sapiens, whether Ab The Caveman or Thomas Jefferson is constrained by finite capacities, physical and emotional, but the stage upon which they play out their lives in a book can be as vivid as a Charles Dickens orphanage or a Louis XVI palace.
Take a Wallace Stevens Sunday morning in a sunny chair and spend the time in a faraway place and time. There in that other world you can become the lustiest knight or the most downtrodden slave in England or Rome or the American Colonies and participate in the most hair raising events, all the while assured of a safe passage home.
Not long ago an Irish painter who lives not far from my cottage said to me, “Thank you. Your buying my work makes it possible for me to live.” My response was immediate and unthinking reflex, “No, you’ve got that backwards. Your work makes it possible for me to live.”
While I have never had much inclination to produce art, surrounding myself with the art of those who do has sustained me as little else can. My sisters and I were sent to Chicago to be raised by my father’s parents when I was twelve. My grandparents, then in their sixties and not knowing what to do with three children after they’d thought their child-rearing days long gone, planned activities for us that often involved taking us to museums. Probably as many as three or four each month. In that, they were abetted by living in a city gloriously rich with museums. Upon high school graduation, I received a scholarship to the Art Institute of Chicago, but I chose to join the Navy instead. After the Korean Conflict, finishing college and beginning a life of teaching, I began buying from the miserly salaries teachers get – thanks to generous “layaway” programs of galleries whereby I could pay a little each month until I could take my treasure home.
Today it is the esthetic of their work about me, the energy and spirit of the artists who make it possible for me to live a life beyond mere existence.
